Whatever the city's priorities are...?

Launching and extending a streetcar system, creating a separated blue line subway, having great schools, great libraries, great parks?

It can't be having great sports stadiums.

It makes no sense, none, to spend $190 million on a stadium for soccer.

No sense, no economic sense, no economic development sense, no building a local economy sense.

I don't understand why within the Home Rule Charter, so many citizen responsibilities, such as voting to approve bond funding, were removed from citizen oversight.

(See "Fenty Eyes Public Funds for Soccer Stadium" and "D.C. United Must Chip In to Get Stadium, Fenty Says" from the Washington Post.)
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I will say it isn't totally impossible to create, or have. communities around sports stadiums. Places like Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, or the extant Boston's Fenway Park and Chicago's Wrigley Field show us that it is possible.

But it takes a very well defined set of priorities and design guidelines.

And the reality is that even a place like Wrigleyville has found the community and especially the commercial district reproduced around baseball and fan entertainment rather than neighborhood serving retail and services.


Still where does it all end?

For one, many stadiums and arenas have a useful life of less than 20 years...

And Mayor Fenty is making the same suggestions about a football stadium. See "Fenty Ponders Plan to Lure Redskins With a Stadium, Perhaps at RFK" from the Post.

For all the talk of DC as a world class city, I merely see ever spiraling corporate welfare.

Taking DC to the next generation in terms of its transit infrastructure would have a far greater economic return than money spent on sports stadiums and arenas. The city would be nothing today without the subway system. Why not extend it?

Dan (BeyondDC) has commented in past blog entries with what I think of as a fatalistic attitude about subway expansion, that it is so costly it won't really be done much. In some respects, he's absolutely right, because it takes incredible political leadership to lead in that fashion.

A couple weeks ago he made a slightly different point, that building heavy rail is justifiable when the increased value in terms of being able to sensitively add density and reform land use patterns exceeds the cost (my words not his).

Proposed changes for the WMATA system, 2001 (separated blue line)". Washington Post graphic.